Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Kenneth R. Timmerman offers a
piece in the Washington Times on Iran’s top terrorist, Qassem Suleymani.

He might not be a household
name in America — at least, not yet. But throughout the Middle East, Qassem
Suleymani makes the righteous and the innocent tremble.

To the righteous — meaning,
from his perspective, the Shiite zealots who believe the Islamic state of Iran
should establish the caliphate and dominate the world — he is an awe-inspiring
figure.

He is powerful. He is brash.
He brazenly shows up on the battlefield to encourage his troops. In Iraq, he
has become the maker of prime ministers and governments, and commands a militia
of 100,000 men.

To his innocent victims, he
is the face of Terror, Inc. As head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), Qassem Suleymani is Iran’s top terrorist.

Bonhomme Richard is on a routine patrol, operating in the Indo-Asia-Pacific
region to serve as a forward-capability for any type of contingency.

The above photo was taken by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Diana Quinlan.

Note: The photo brings back memories. I visited Sasebo, Japan in 1971 when the USS Kitty Hawk pulled in for R&R during our WESTPAC Vietnam cruise. I later did my share of line handling while serving aboard the harbor tugboat USS Saugus at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland.

Robert McCrum at the British
newspaper the Guardian offers his pick of Mark Twain’s Life On the Mississippi for
number 56 in the 100 best nonfiction books.

When I was a boy, there was
but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of
the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient
ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.”

Here is the unmistakable
voice of America’s greatest and most original, prose writer describing the
childhood that would inspire his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1884). Mark Twain (for it is he) goes on:

“When a circus came and went,
it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that
came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and
then we had the hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be
pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a
steamboatman always remained.”

Life on the Mississippi is
not just the brilliant sketch that precedes the vaster and more colourful
canvas of a celebrated novel, it expresses the heart and soul of Samuel
Clemens, the alter ego of Mark Twain. Alongside The Innocents Abroad (1869) and
Roughing It (1872), this tour de force of unreliable reportage, spliced with
travel, history and memoir, provides a deep insight into Huckleberry Finn as
well as a key to its author and his outrageous originality. As his most recent
biographer, Ron Powers, has put it: “Twain’s way of seeing and hearing things
changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things. He was the Lincoln of
American literature.”

Charles Krauthammer offers
his take on President Trump's foreign policy in a column published in the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

At the heart of Donald
Trump's foreign policy team lies a glaring contradiction.

On the one hand, it is
composed of men of experience, judgment, and traditionalism. Meaning, they are
all very much within the parameters of mainstream American internationalism as
practiced since 1945. Practically every member of the team - the heads of State,
Homeland Security, the CIA, and most especially Defense Secretary James Mattis
and national security adviser H.R. McMaster - could fit in a cabinet put
together by, say, Hillary Clinton.

The commander in chief, on
the other hand, is quite the opposite - inexperienced, untraditional,
unbounded. His pronouncements on everything from the "one China"
policy to the two-state (Arab-Israeli) solution, from NATO obsolescence to the
ravages of free trade, continue to confound and, as we say today, disrupt.

The sample size is tiny but
take, for example, the German excursion. Trump dispatched his grown-ups - Vice
President Pence, Defense Secretary Mattis, Secretary of Homeland Security John
Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson - to various international confabs
in Germany to reassure allies with the usual pieties about America's commitment
to European security. They did drop a few hints to Trump's loud complaints
about allied parasitism, in particular shirking their share of the defense
burden.

Within days, Germany
announced a 20,000-man expansion of its military. Smaller European countries
are likely to take note of the new setup. It's classic good-cop, bad-cop: The
secretaries represent foreign policy continuity but their boss preaches America
First. Message: Shape up.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Nick Poppy at the New York
Post offers a piece on Tom Clavin’s book on Dodge City, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson

Any man fool enough to look
for trouble in 1870s Dodge City could count on two things: finding it, and
finding himself knocked over the head by the butt of a gun. And if he was
especially unlucky or stupid, he could find a third thing: himself full of lead.

The infamous Kansas cow town
had bloody beginnings, and violence, or the threat of it, was rarely far from
mind. It started with buffalo. The seemingly endless herds on the nearby
plains, coupled with demand for skins and tongues (considered a delicacy back
East), birthed a buffalo hunting industry. And that industry, in turn, created
a leathery class of buffalo hunters — skilled marksmen who could shoot from the
saddle, subsist in harsh conditions and not shy from the sight of blood.

Out of these hunters’ ranks
came two of the most fabled lawmen of the American West: Wyatt Earp and Bat
Masterson, whose fascinating careers are brought to life in Tom Clavin’s “Dodge
City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.”

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Nicole Lambert at the Daily
Mail offers a piece on one of my favorite writers, Len Deighton, the author of
The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin,Bomber and SS-GB, which has been adapted
for TV and is now airing on the BBC.

He has dined with everyone
from Nazi criminals to the cream of British society; from rock’n’roll royalty
to eminent philosophers. He has lived all over the world and known spies and
traitors. Some say he would have made a successful intelligence agent himself.

But he is also a man of many
parts. Author, film producer and successful artist, published cook — who made
it cool for men to be in the kitchen — and eminent historian: Len Deighton is
all of these.

As a writer, he changed the
way the world looked at spies with The Ipcress File, the 1962 thriller about a
working-class spook (un-named in the book but christened Harry Palmer for
Michael Caine’s screen portrayal) who is as interested in getting his expenses
signed as in catching enemies of the state.

He also created a fascinating
and terrifying alternative world in his 1978 book SS-GB, now adapted by BBC1
for peak-time Sunday viewing, set in a wartime England that has been invaded by
the Germans and is under Nazi rule, with prime minister Winston Churchill
executed and King George VI imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Deighton, who turned 88 last
weekend, has dreamt up many fascinating characters in his novels but few are
more intriguing than the reclusive man himself.

Friday, February 24, 2017

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2017 — Navy Adm. Mike Rogers, the chief of
U.S. Cyber Command, discussed the command’s
future over the next five to 10 years yesterday at West 2017, a sea services
event in San Diego co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval
Institute.

AFCEA is the international information technology, communications and
electronics association for professionals in government, industry and academia.

Rogers, also director of the National Security Agency, fielded questions
from moderator retired Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, who’s now dean of the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He’s also chairman of
the board of the U.S. Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Topics included integrating cyber at the tactical level of warfare,
modeling Cybercom after the structure used by the Special Operations Command,
the Cybercom workforce, and the relationship between Cybercom and the private
sector, all in the five-to 10-year horizon.

“Here's what we need to build toward -- in the immediate near term,
elevating Cyber Command to a combatant command,” Rogers said, adding, “I think
the potential for that happening in the near term is high.”

Tactical Cyber
Over the next five to 10 years the admiral said he would like to see
cyber integrated offensively and defensively “down to the operational tactical
level.”

Offensive cyber in some ways is treated like nuclear weapons, he added,
“in the sense that their application outside a defined area of hostilities is
controlled at the chief-executive level and is not delegated down.”

Rogers said he hopes that over the next five to 10 years Cybercom can
engender enough confidence in decision makers and policymakers that they feel
comfortable pushing offensive cyber activities to the tactical level.

“We should be integrating [cyber] into the strike group and on the
amphibious expeditionary side. We should view this as another toolkit that's
available … as a commander is coming up with a broad schema of maneuver to
achieve a desired outcome or end state. That’s what I hope,” the admiral
said.

Special Operations Model
Rogers and Stavridis likened the journey of cyber to that of special
forces, whose members in earlier times were called in only for special occasions
and their use was highly controlled. Today, they said, combatant commanders have
component commands from each service and from special operations.

“I would create Cyber Command much in the image of [U.S. Special Operations Command],” Rogers
said. “Give it that broad set of responsibilities where it not only is taking
forces fielded by the services and employing them; it's articulating the
requirement and the vision and you're giving it the resources to create the
capacity and then employ it.”

SOF also provides a theater special operations commander across all
nine combatant commands, said Rogers, adding, -- that’s “a model I think we
should drive to.”

On the military side, the Cybercom leadership is finding that what
motivates a young man or woman to be a Marine Corps rifleman, to work the
flightline in the Air Force or to be a deck seaman in the Navy also motivates
cyber warriors.

They want to be part of something bigger than themselves, they like the
ethos and culture of the military, he said.

“That's a real selling point for us right now,” the admiral said. “The
self-image of this workforce is that they are the digital warriors of the 21st
century. The way they look at themselves -- we're in the future, we're the
cutting edge, we're doing something new, we're blazing a path.”

As a leader, Rogers said, “you cannot underestimate the value of
that.”

Rogers says he reminds recruits that as cyber warriors they’ll be able
to do things in uniform, within the defense and Law of Armed Conflict
application, that they can’t do anywhere else, and they’ll gain responsibility
as they show proficiency in the job.

“Everybody responds well to that,” he said. “Retention is good right
now.”

Public-Private Cooperation
In its work with the private sector over the next five to 10 years,
Rogers said he would like to see Cybercom and tech companies “get to a level of
integration where we have actual physical collocation with each
other.”

The admiral says that in his military experience, “when we create
[command-and-control] structures, when we create analytic and
command-and-control nodes … we try to bring all together as much data, as many
different perspectives and as many different elements in the broad enterprise
that are necessary to achieve the outcome. I think we need to do the same thing”
with the tech sector.

Rogers said he’d like to see Cybercom, for one thing, take advantage of
the sector constructs that are in place for the 16 segments in private industry
that Presidential Policy Directive 21 designates as infrastructure critical to
the nation.

“How do we take advantage of that and integrate at that level? Because
as an execution guy, my experience teaches me that you want to train, you want
to exercise, you want to simulate as many conditions as you can before you
actually come into contact with an opponent,” Rogers said.

Help from the Tech Sector
On the cyber defense side, the admiral said, he’d like help from the
technology sector to get to machine learning at speed and automation, and
through this technology to help Cybercom free-up human capital. He’d also like
the sector’s help with human capital development.

“People love to talk about the technology, but our greatest edge isn't
technology; our greatest edge is that motivated man or woman with the
intellectual capacity to anticipate, to be innovative and to be agile,” Rogers
said. “Because ... what we’re dealing with is driven by a man or woman somewhere
in the world sitting at a keyboard. There's a human dimension in all of this.
It's not just about the machine.”

On the offensive side -- speaking for himself rather than the
department, he said -- there are things Rogers is trying to come to grips
with.

“In the application of kinetic functionality -- weapons -- we go to the
private sector and say, ‘Build this thing we call a [joint directed-attack
munition], a [Tomahawk land-attack munition].’ Fill in the blank,” he
said.

“On the offensive side, to date, we have done almost all of our weapons
development internally,” Rogers said. “And part of me goes -- five to 10 years
from now is that a long-term sustainable model? Does that enable you to access
fully the capabilities resident in the private sector? I'm still trying to work
my way through that, intellectually.”

The U.S. Attorney's Office District of New Jersey released the below information:

NEWARK, N.J. – A Pennsylvania man who operated a construction company that did work at construction projects at two military bases in New Jersey today admitted paying bribes and kickbacks to get the contracts, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.

George Grassie, 54, of Covington Township, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton in Newark federal court to an information charging him with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and commit bribery and one count of providing unlawful kickbacks.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court:

Grassie owned a business that did construction, excavation and landscaping and did work as a subcontractor at Picattiny Arsenal (PICA) and Joint Base McGuire-Dix Lakehurst (Ft. Dix). He admitted that from December 2010 to December 2013, he paid bribes valued at $95,000 to $150,000 to an individual employed by the U.S. Army Contracting Command in New Jersey to obtain and retain subcontracts and other favorable assistance at PICA and Fort Dix. He also admitted that he paid kickbacks valued at $40,000 to $95,000 to Shawn Fuller and James Conway, who were then project managers for a prime contractor at PICA and Fort Dix.

The conspiracy charge to which Grassie pleaded guilty carries a maximum potential penalty of five years in prison. The charge for making unlawful kickbacks to which Grassie pleaded guilty carries a maximum potential penalty of 10 years in prison. Both charges carry a maximum fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss associated with the offense, whichever is greatest. Sentencing is scheduled for May 31, 2017.

U.S. Attorney Fishman credited special agents of the FBI, under the direction of Special Agent in Charge Timothy Gallagher; the U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, under the direction of Craig R.Rupert, Special Agent in Charge, DCIS Northeast Field Office; and the U.S. Army, Major Procurement Fraud Unit, Criminal Investigation Command, under the direction of Special Agent in Charge Larry Scott Moreland, with conducting the investigation leading to today’s guilty plea.

The government is represented by Senior Litigation Counsel Leslie Faye Schwartz, of the United States Attorney’s Office’s Special Prosecutions Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Llanes, Deputy Chief, General Crimes Unit, of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Criminal Division, in Newark.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

The U.S. Navy released the above photo and the below caption:Sailors assigned to the littoral combat ship USS Coronado (LCS 4) swim in the South China Sea. Coronado is a fast and agile warship tailor-made to patrol the region's littorals and work hull-to-hull with partner navies, providing the U.S. 7th Fleet with the flexible capabilities it needs now and in the future. The above photo was taken by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Amy M. Ressler.Note: You can click on the above to enlarge.

The film is based on the true crime book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case On Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brant. You can read my Crime Beat column on the book and the story via the below link:

Note: If you would like to learn more about George Washington, our greatest president, (as well as Benedict Arnold, our greatest traitor), I recommend Nathaniel Philbrick's Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution.

Monday, February 20, 2017

The Washington Times published my review of Ann McElhinney and Phelin McAleer's Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer

I followed the Kermit Gosnell
murder trial in 2013, which was covered by the local Philadelphia media, but ignored
largely by the national media.

Now journalists and
documentary filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer offer a book on the
life and crimes of the Philadelphia abortion doctor who was convicted of three
counts of murder by using scissors to sever the spinal cords of babies
delivered alive, as well as various other crimes.

As the authors note, Gosnell
destroyed records and often came in on Sundays without his staff and performed
numerous illegal late-term abortions, so there is no telling just how many
babies he murdered in this fashion and by other means — hence the book’s
subtitle, “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”

The case began, the authors
explain, with a drug bust.

“It wasn’t a homicide case —
until it was. Originally the authorities weren’t investigating murder, or even
illegal late-term abortions. They were just trying to bust a prescription drug
mill,” the authors write. “But they wound up discovering something far worse.”

Sunday, February 19, 2017

SAN DIEGO — Richard Lyon, the first Navy SEAL to rise to the rank of admiral, has died at 93.

Lyon served four decades in the Navy, including World War II and the Korean War, and was among the first U.S. troops to enter Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped. He went on to work as a Scout intelligence officer in northern China and later served in Korea.

Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, called Lyon a legend who was honored with the title "Bullfrog" for being the oldest-serving SEAL. Lyon regularly attended the graduation ceremonies of SEALs.

... Lyon died Friday surrounded by family and friends at his beachfront home in Oceanside, north of San Diego, said lifelong friend Kelly Sarber, who met Lyon as a child because her father was also a SEAL.

Sarber recalled photos of Lyon and other SEALs swimming with knives during the elite military team's beginnings.

"He reminded me of James Bond," she said. "I never saw him lose his cool. I never saw him be nothing but kind and treat people with manners. He was a real class act."

John Domini offers a review Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret released novels for the Philadelphia Inquirer.When the bad news arrives, it's always with a kink. For Jules Maigret, chief inspector, a case might begin with a desperate call from a stranger. Before the Paris detective can get his name, the poor man's corpse has been dumped on the street. Then again, Maigret may hear his own name bandied about, unfathomably, in connection with a murder far to the south, on a Mediterranean island.Whatever bizarre twist sets the inspector on a killer's trail, in these classic mysteries from Georges Simenon, Maigret won't go long without stopping into a bistro. "He knew," we're told inDead Man, "he would not be able to resist the temptation of going for a drink in the Caves du Beaujolais." Oh, and he'll take aplate andouille, as well. Down on the Cote d'Azur, he'll have the bouillabaisse.Naturally, the fine dining never interferes with the job. Just the opposite. While the detective savors his fish pie, his calvados, he's often struck by some revelation; he cracks the case. The Maigret novels can be thought of as "police procedurals," in that they take an officer through both discovery and bureaucracy - along with some serious chills - but that procedure seems worlds apart from the system in the States. An American cop reading these novels might find himself enthralled, like so many before him, but he'll wonder whether he's working in the wrong country and century.Simenon polished off these three Maigrets in the late 1940s. Enjoying them now, among the first of Penguin Classic's series of new translations, a reader swings from nodding at familiar predators and prey, caught in familiar snares of love or money, to feeling as though he has landed on another planet.
You can read read the rest of the review via the below link:

In 1971 I was a 19-year-old sailor stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, which was home-ported in San Diego, California after a nearly year-long deployment to Southeast Asia and combat operations off the coast of Vietnam.

I was a "short-timer," eagerly awaiting my separation from the U.S. Navy when I and a couple of friends from the ship went to a movie theater in San Diego to see Sean Connery as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.

Considering that George Lazenby had never acted before and he had the dubious honor of replacing Connery, I thought he had done a fine job as James Bond in the previous film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But I was pleased that Connery was back as Bond in the new film.

Prior to seeing the film, I had read the novel, as well as all of Ian Fleming's novels, as I've been a Fleming aficionado since my early teens. I came away disappointed in the film, as it was not faithful to Fleming's novel, as On Her Majesty's Secret Service had been.The producers made Diamonds Are Forever as an action-comedy rather than a thriller, and this led the way for the lighthearted and amusing Roger Moore-Bond films that followed throughout the 1970's and into the 1980's.

In Fleming's novel Diamonds Are Forever James Bond is pitted against American organized crime.

From London, Bond goes undercover as a diamond smuggler and he encounters American mobsters in New York and later in Las Vegas. And in between Bond visits Saratoga Springs, where the mob has arranged to pay off Bond via a crooked horse race.
Fleming's novel was influenced by Senator Estes Kefauver's committee hearings on organized crime in America. The hearings were televised in the early 1950's and America and the world got to see American gangsters such as Tony Accardo, the mob boss of Chicago who once worked for Al Capone, Frank Costello, known as the New York "Prime Minister of Crime," Meyer Lansky, and a sultry Virginia Hill, the former girlfriend of Ben "Bugsy" Siegal.

In Saratoga Springs Fleming captured the atmosphere of the race track, the gambling fever that surrounds horse racing, and the presence and influence of organized crime. I recall vividly the brutal scene in the mud baths where the crooked jockey is tortured by mobsters.

I thought this was a great passage in a great thriller, and Raymond Chandler, perhaps our greatest crime novelist, agreed.

Unfortunately, the film didn't use any of this material. Perhaps one day the Bond producers will remake Diamonds Are Forever as a thriller and use Fleming's Saratoga Springs story.

All of this came to mind when I happened to come across a piece in the Saratogian (a newspaper Bond read in the novel)that covers Fleming's 1954 visit to Saratoga Springs to research his novel.

The piece offers generous passages from the novel:“Saratoga Springs was the Coney Island of the underworld until the Kefauvers put their show on the television. It frightened the hicks and chased the hoodlums to Las Vegas. But the mobs exercised dominion over Saratoga for a long time. It was a colony of the national gangs and they ran it with pistols and baseball bats.”

The piece is also about a thoroughbred horse trainer by the name of H. James Bond.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

A current U.S. Navy Commander was charged in a complaint unsealed today with accepting luxury travel, elaborate dinners and services of prostitutes from foreign defense contractor Leonard Francis in exchange for classified and internal U.S. Navy information.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Alana Robinson of the Southern District of California, Director Andrew L. Traver of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and Director Dermot F. O’Reilly of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) made the announcement.

Mario Herrera, 48, of Helotes, Texas, was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery in connection with interactions with Leonard Francis, the former CEO of Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), a defense contracting firm based in Singapore. Herrera was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, this morning and is scheduled to make his initial appearance in federal court in the Western District of Texas. The United States will seek removal of Herrera to San Diego to face charges.

According to the complaint, Herrera participated in a bribery scheme with Francis in which he accepted luxury travel and entertainment expenses and the services of prostitutes in exchange for helping to steer lucrative U.S. Navy contracts to Francis and GDMA. Herrera provided Francis with internal, proprietary U.S. Navy information and intervened on GDMA’s behalf in contract disputes. According the complaint, Herrera directed ships to take alternative routes that benefitted GDMA on two separate occasions, costing the U.S. Navy $3.6 million.

To date, a total of 17 individuals have been charged in connection with the scheme; of those, 13 have pleaded guilty, including: Admiral Robert Gilbeau, Captain Michael Brooks, Commander Bobby Pitts, Captain Daniel Dusek, Commander Michael Misiewicz, Lt. Commander Todd Malaki, Commander Jose Luis Sanchez, former NCIS Special Agent John Beliveau and U.S. Petty Officer First Class Daniel Layug.

Brooks, Gilbeau and Sanchez await sentencing. In May 2016, Pitts was charged and his case is currently pending. On Jan. 21, 2016, Layug was sentenced to 27 months in prison and to pay a $15,000 fine. On Jan. 29, 2016, Malaki was sentenced to 40 months in prison and to pay $15,000 in restitution to the Navy and a $15,000 fine. On March 25, 2016, Dusek was sentenced to 46 months in prison and to pay $30,000 in restitution to the Navy and a $70,000 fine. On April 29, 2016, Misiewicz was sentenced to 78 months in prison and to pay $95,000 in restitution to the Navy and a $100,000 fine. On Oct. 14, 2016, Beliveau was sentenced to 12 years in prison and to pay $20 million in restitution. On Dec. 2, 2016, Simpkins was sentenced to 72 months in prison, to pay $450,000 in restitution, to forfeit $150,000 and pay a $50,000 fine.

A criminal complaint is merely an accusation, and the accused is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.

DCIS, NCIS and the Defense Contract Audit Agency are investigating the case. Assistant Chief Brian R. Young of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mark W. Pletcher and Patrick Hovakimian of the Southern District of California are prosecuting the case.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Veteran journalist and author
George Anastasia offers a look at former New Jersey cop Bob Buccino, the author
of New Jersey Mob, Memoirs of a Top Cop at jerseymanmagazine.com.

Back in the 1980s, the wife
of a South Philadelphia mobster had firsthand knowledge of her husband’s
involvement in two gangland murders. This did not make for a happy marital
abode.

She came to believe that her
life was in jeopardy, so she filed for divorce and eventually became a
government witness against her former spouse. While living in protective
custody, she took up with one of the FBI agents assigned to guard her and
married him.

Looking for some personal
insights, I asked her what the difference was between the cops and the
wiseguys.

Without missing a beat, she
replied, “The cops have badges.”I thought about that while reading Bob
Buccino’s self-published book New Jersey Mob, Memoirs of a Top Cop. Buccino’s
highly acclaimed law enforcement career was built around his crusade to take
down the mob in his native New Jersey. But he frankly admits that as a
teenager, he was on a different path and could have easily ended up as a made
member of one of the seven organized crime families that operate in the Garden
State.

Fate, happenstance and a
young wife who made it clear she’d have nothing to do with him if he didn’t
change his ways led him to take the New Jersey State Police exam two years
after he graduated from high school in Orange, the town where he grew up and
where he cut his teeth running with a teenage gang, collecting numbers bets for
mobsters and bouncing in and out of trouble.

“I saw wiseguys and
recognized the Mafia long before the FBI even acknowledged their existence,”
Buccino says of his childhood and teenage years in 1950s North Jersey. “You
could place a horse bet or a wager on almost any sport contest in almost every
candy store and luncheonette.”

As a teenager, he was
fascinated with the life and wanted to be a part of it.

“I started running numbers,
selling football pools, and ran small nickel and dime card games,” he writes.
“I always had money in my pocket. I idolized wiseguys like Little Pussy Russo
in his pink Cadillac convertible. I admired that way of life. No one messed with
made guys in the neighborhood.”

Street smart and never afraid
to mix it up, Buccino had all the attributes that the organization valued. But
instead of turning to a life of crime, he used those same character traits to
build a career in law enforcement. In many ways he epitomized what the woman in
South Philadelphia recognized intuitively. The attitude, the swagger, the
willingness to take risks and live life on the edge were part of the wiseguy
ethos. But they could also be part of what made someone a good cop.

They met online. He said he
was a friend of a friend. The woman, in her 50s and struggling in her marriage,
was happy to find someone to chat with. “He was saying all the right things,”
she remembered. “He was interested in me. He was interested in getting to know
me better. He was very positive, and I felt like there was a real connection
there.”

That connection would end up
costing the woman $2 million and an untold amount of heartache after the man
she fell in love with—whom she never met in person—took her for every cent she
had.

It’s called a romance scam,
and this devastating Internet crime is on the rise. Victims—predominantly older
widowed or divorced women targeted by criminal groups usually from Nigeria—are,
for the most part, computer literate and educated. But they are also
emotionally vulnerable. And con artists know exactly how to exploit that
vulnerability because potential victims freely post details about their lives
and personalities on dating and social media sites.

Trolling for victims online
“is like throwing a fishing line,” said Special Agent Christine Beining, a
veteran financial fraud investigator in the FBI’s Houston Division who has seen
a substantial increase in the number of romance scam cases. “The Internet makes
this type of crime easy because you can pretend to be anybody you want to be.
You can be anywhere in the world and victimize people,” she said. “The
perpetrators will reach out to a lot of people on various networking sites to
find somebody who may be a good target. Then they use what the victims have on
their profile pages and try to work those relationships and see which ones
develop.”

“The Internet makes this type
of crime easy because you can pretend to be anybody you want to be.”

Christine Beining, special
agent, FBI Houston

In the case of the Texas
woman who lost everything, it was her strong Christian faith—which she happily
publicized on her Facebook profile—that gave “Charlie” an incredible advantage
when he began courting her.

“I’m very active on
Facebook,” said the woman, who agreed to share her story in the hopes that
others might avoid becoming victims. “I thought it was safe.” After she
friended Charlie—without verifying his bogus claim that they had a mutual
friend—“he would read my wall, I would read his wall. We would post things, he
would like things. Then it got to where we would share e-mails. We started
sharing pictures.”

According to Beining, this is
standard operating procedure for romance scammers, who assume other people’s
identities to trick their victims. “They make themselves out to be
average-looking people,” she said. “They are generally not trying to build
themselves up too high.”

The scammer’s intention is to
establish a relationship as quickly as possible, endear himself to the victim,
gain trust, and propose marriage. He will make plans to meet in person, but
that will never happen. Eventually, he will ask for money.

According to the FBI’s
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which provides the public with a means
of reporting Internet-facilitated crimes, romance scams—also called confidence
fraud—result in the highest amount of financial losses to victims when compared
to other online crimes.

In 2016, almost 15,000
complaints categorized as romance scams or confidence fraud were reported to
IC3 (nearly 2,500 more than the previous year), and the losses associated with
those complaints exceeded $230 million. The states with the highest numbers of
victims were California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. In Texas
last year, the IC3 received more than 1,000 complaints from victims reporting
more than $16 million in losses related to romance scams.

‘I was Looking for Happiness’

When she first encountered
Charlie in 2014, the Texas woman recalled, “I was in an emotionally abusive
marriage, and things had not been good for probably at least 10 years.” Her new
online friend seemed to come along at just the right time. “I was looking for happiness,”
she said. “I thought I could find that with Charlie.”

Romance scammers often say
they are in the building and construction industry and are engaged in projects
outside the U.S. That makes it easier to avoid meeting in person—and more
plausible when they ask their victims for help. They will suddenly need money
for a medical emergency or unexpected legal fee. “They promise to repay the
loan immediately,” Beining said, “but the victims never get their money back.”

Charlie claimed to be in the
construction field. “He was trying to finish up a job in California,” the woman
said, “and he needed some money to help finish the job. I thought about it long
and hard. I prayed about it. I’ve always been a very giving person, and I
figured if I had money … I could send him some [money]. And he promised to have
it back within 24 to 48 hours. I thought, ‘I could do that.’ It was kind of a
statement of faith, too.”

She wired him $30,000. A day
passed and then another, and she didn’t get her money back. “I still thought
everything was okay,” she said, “just that he was the victim of some bad luck.”
And then Charlie needed another $30,000.

Empty Promises

For the next two years, the
woman believed Charlie’s stories after each new request for funds. Everything
he said made sense, and, after all, they were in love. Eventually, the woman’s
financial adviser became alarmed about her steadily dwindling accounts and,
suspecting fraud, urged her to contact the FBI.

The subsequent investigation
led by Beining resulted in the arrest of two Nigerians posing as South African
diplomats who had come to the U.S. to collect money from the woman on behalf of
Charlie, who claimed he was paid $42 million for a construction project he
completed in South Africa. The woman believed she would be paying to have the
money—including the repayment of her $2 million—transferred to the U.S. from
South Africa, where Charlie was still supposedly working.

In July 2016, the two
Nigerian co-conspirators pleaded guilty in connection with their roles in the
scam, and a federal judge sentenced them each to 36 months in prison last
December. But Charlie is still at large, presumably in Nigeria, and there may
be little hope of bringing him to justice.

“This is a very difficult
crime to prove,” Beining said. “When someone is using a computer to hide
behind, the hardest thing to find out is who they are. We can find out where in
the world their computer is being used. It’s identifying who they actually are
that’s the hard part. That is why this individual remains a fugitive.”

It also explains why romance
scams are on the rise: It’s a lucrative and easy crime to commit, and easier
still to remain anonymous and beyond the reach of authorities. “It’s not like
going in a bank and holding a gun to the teller,” Beining explained, “because
there are so many leads that you provide law enforcement when you do that. Even
if you are able to get out of the bank, we can probably find out who you are
and track you down. But with an Internet crime like this, it’s much more
difficult.”

As for the Texas woman, she
came forward “because I don’t want this to happen to anybody else. I not only
invested money in this man but there is a big, huge piece of my heart that I
invested in him,” she said. “It’s not just the finances, it’s the emotional
part, too—being embarrassed, being ashamed, being humiliated.”

“I don’t want this to happen
to anybody else. I not only invested money in this man but there is a big, huge
piece of my heart that I invested in him.”

Romance scam victim

Even now, though, she remains
conflicted. A part of her still wants to believe that Charlie is real and that
their relationship was real—that the e-mail exchanges about church and the
phone calls when they sang together and prayed together meant as much to him as
they did to her. She even holds out hope that one day Charlie will repay her,
as he promised to do so many times.

Otherwise, there is no doubt
that he is a heartless criminal who robbed her and broke her heart—and who is
almost certainly continuing to victimize other women in the same way.

“I can’t even imagine a man,
a person, that could be this bad,” she said. “I can’t think of him that way. …
There can’t be a man in this world that could be this horrible to have
purposefully done what he’s done to me.”

Don’t Become a Victim

The criminals who carry out
romance scams are experts at what they do. They spend hours honing their skills
and sometimes keep journals on their victims to better understand how to
manipulate and exploit them.

“Behind the veil of romance,
it’s a criminal enterprise like any other,” said Special Agent Christine
Beining. “And once a victim becomes a victim, in that they send money, they
will often be placed on what’s called a ‘sucker list,’ ” she said. “Their names
and identities are shared with other criminals, and they may be targeted in the
future.”

To stay safe online, be
careful what you post, because scammers can use that information against you.
Always use reputable websites, but assume that con artists are trolling even
the most reputable dating and social media sites. If you develop a romantic
relationship with someone you meet online, consider the following:

Research the person’s photo
and profile using online searches to see if the material has been used
elsewhere.

Go slow and ask lots of
questions.

Beware if the individual
seems too perfect or quickly asks you to leave a dating service or Facebook to
go “offline.”

Beware if the individual
attempts to isolate you from friends and family or requests inappropriate
photos or financial information that could later be used to extort you.

Beware if the individual
promises to meet in person but then always comes up with an excuse why he or
she can’t. If you haven’t met the person after a few months, for whatever
reason, you have good reason to be suspicious.

Never send money to anyone
you don’t know personally. “If you don’t know them, don’t send money,” Beining
said. “You will see what their true intentions are after that.”

If you suspect an online
relationship is a scam, stop all contact immediately. And if you are the victim
of a romance scam, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint
Center.

PaulDavisOnCrime@aol.com

Paul Davis is a writer who covers crime. He has written extensively about organized crime, street crime, sex crime, cyber crime, drug crime, white collar crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. He is an online columnist and contributing editor to The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International and a regular contributor to the Washington Times. His work has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and other print and online publications. Paul Davis has been a student of crime since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970 and served on the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War. He also served two years on the Navy harbor tugboat USS Saugus at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland. He went on to do security work as a Defense Department civilian employee and then became a freelance writer. You can read Paul Davis' Crime Beat columns, crime fiction and magazine and newspaper pieces on this website. You can also read his full bio by clicking on the above photo.